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In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland is the latest curmudgeon to
recycle Nick Carr’s distraction trope, microwave it, and serve it
with gravy. The argument is that Twitter—though possibly a
wonderful thing for Egyptian revolutionaries (we can argue that trope another day)—is distracting us Westerners
from our important work of deep reading and deep thinking and
something simply must be done. We have a crisis of concentration
brought on by a crisis of distraction, he tells us. Some people I
respect react and call this matter urgent.

Bollocks, as my Guardian friends would say.

I want you to think back with me now—I’m hypnotizing you, which
should alleviate the stress of distraction, at least
momentarily—to the moment in 1994 or soon thereafter when you
discovered the World Wide Web and a new activity: browsing.
Didn’t we all, every one of us, waste hours—days, even—aimlessly,
purposelessly clicking links from one site to the next, not
knowing where we would go and then not knowing where our hours
went? Oh my God, we would never get anything done again, we
fretted. We are all too distracted. We were hypnotized.

I know from market research I did that back then that it was not
long before browsing diminished and died as our primary behavior
online. We became directed in our searches. We came to the web
looking for something, got it, and moved on. That’s partly
because the tools improved: Yahoo gave us a directory; brands
took on the role of serving expected content; Google gave us
search. But this change in behavior came mainly because we got
over the newness of browsing and had other, more important things
to do and we learned how to prioritize our time again.

It is ever thus. Think back to the early days of TV and cable: My
God, with so much to watch, will we ever get anything done? The
exact same argument can be made—indeed, one wishes it were
made—about books: With so many of them unread, how can we
possibly ever do anything else? But, of course, we do.

Twitter addiction shall pass. Have faith—faith in your fellow man
and woman. I was busy doing other things yesterday, important
things, and so I pretty much did not tweet. I survived without
it. So, I’m depressed to say, did all of you without me. I just
wrote in my book that Twitter indeed created a distraction to
writing the book, as I was tempted by the siren call of the
conversation that never ends. But it also helped with my writing
that I always had ready researchers and editors, friends willing
to help when I got stuck or needed inspiration.

Twitter is a tool to manage and we learn how to do that, once the
new-car smell wears off. That’s exactly what has happened with
blogging. And here is the moment the curmudgeons triumphally
declare the triumphalists wrong and
blogging—which, remember, was also going to destroy us—dead or
dying. What killed blogging? Twitter. Ah, the circle of life, the
great mandala.

But I can guarantee that the distraction trope will be pulled out
of the refrigerator and reheated again and again as the
curmudgeons raise alarms about the destructive power of the next
shiny thing. I’m loving reading a long-awaited new book by the
esteemed Gutenberg scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein. In Divine Art, Infernal Machine, she takes
us back to exact same arguments over the printing press among the
“triumphalists” and the “catastrophists.” That is perhaps better
title for our curmudgeons. She quotes Erasmus arguing that
the benefits of printing were almost eclipsed by complaints about
increased output: swarms of new books were glutting the market
and once venerated authors were being neglected. “To what corner
of the world do they not fly, these swarms of new books?… the
very multitude of them is hurting scholarship, because it creates
a glut, and even in good things satiety is most harmful.” The
minds of men “flighty and curious of anything new” are lured
“away from the study of old authors.”

And isn’t really their fear, the old authors, that they are being
replaced? Control in culture is shifting.

What are our catastrophists really saying when they argue that
Twitter is ruining us and Western (at least) civilization? They
are branding us all sheeple. Ah, but you might say: Jarvis,
aren’t you and your triumphalists making similarly overbroad
statements when you say that these tools unlock new wonders in
us? Perhaps. But there is a fundamental difference in our claims.

We triumphalists—I don’t think I am one but, what the hell, I’ll
don the uniform—argue that these tools unlock some potential in
us, help us do what we want to do and better. The catastrophists
are saying that we can be easily led astray to do stupid things
and become stupid. One is an argument of enablement. One is an
argument of enslavement. Which reveals more respect for humanity?
That is the real dividing line. I start with faith in my fellow
man and woman. The catastrophists start with little or none.

Ah, but some will say, these tools are neutral. They
can be used by bad actors as well. That’s certainly true. but bad
actors are usually already bad. The tools don’t make them bad.

Take the Great Distractor of the age: Mark Zuckerberg and
Facebook. The real debate over him in The Social Network and among privacy
regulators and between catastrophists and triumphalists is about
his motives. I write in Public Parts:
If, as the movie paints him, he acts out of his own cynical
goals—getting attention, getting laid, getting rich—then
manipulating us to reveal ourselves smells of exploitation. But
if instead he has a higher aim—to help us share and connect and
to make the world more open—then it’s easier to respect him, as
Jake [my son] and I do. . . .

There is the inherent optimism that fuels the likes of him: that
with the right tools and power in the right hands, the world will
keep getting better. “On balance, making the world more open is
good,” Zuckerberg says. “Our mission is to make the world more
open and connected.” The optimist has to believe in his fellow
man, in empowering him more than protecting against him. . . .

He believes he is creating the tools that help people to do what
they naturally want to do but couldn’t do before. In his view,
he’s not changing human nature. He’s enabling it.

I talked with Ev Williams at Twitter and he says similar things.
He’s not trying to distract us to death. (That would be Evil Ev.)
He’s trying to help us connect with each other and information,
instantly, relevantly. (That is Good Ev.) It’s up to us how we
use the tool well—indeed, we the community of users are the ones
who helped invent the power of @ and # and $ and RT to refine the
gift Ev et al gave us. I heard a similar mission from Dennis
Crowley at Foursquare: helping us make serendipitous connections we otherwise
wouldn’t.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the one who started this whole mess in the
beginning (damn you, Sir!) is trying to push all the toolmakers
to the next level, to better understand the science of what they
are doing and to unlock the data layer of our world. Wonderful
possibilities await—if you believe that the person next to you
isn’t a distractable dolt but instead someone with unmet
potential. There’s the real argument, my friends. And you are my
friends, for remember that I’m the one who respects you.